Matthew Cohen, MSW

Matthew Cohen, MSW

Social Justice Solutions | Staff Writer
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Should Someone HAVE To Work 75 Hours A Week to Make Ends Meet? McDonalds’ Thinks So.

The combination of inflation and a stagnant minimum wage have created a climate where working 40 hours a week is not enough to support one person, let alone a family. That does not stop the entities responsible for stock markets that always rise, and domestic prices that always seem to do the same, from ignoring reality. Out of the goodness of their heats, McDonald’s and Visa have partnered to created a website to help employees learn how to budget properly.

Here are some of the gems that one could gleam from their efforts:

  • Their employees should be working two jobs.
  • They should also have a car payment of $150, but curiously no budget for gas.
  • Somehow health insurance should cost $20.

All in all McDonalds’ expects a person to live on 2000/month net, and as Death and Taxes has calculated, said person would have to work 75 hours a week to do so. Death and Taxes did a fantastic job of analyzing this “budget” and we urge you to checkout their take on it. What they did not comment on was the assumption that a poor worker should have to work almost twice as many hours as the standard work week in order to survive.

Minimum wage, the standard work week, and regulations on working conditions were supposed to create an environment where the worker’s rights were of primary concern in the labor market. By manipulation of the stock market, minimum wage, and inflation corporations have found a way to bypass these regulations. McDonalds’ is implicitly suggesting that a worker should have to work beyond those regulations in order to obtain the necessities for living, and as such is ignoring the reasoning for the legislation all together. It is proof of the neglect that corporate America has for our workers and worker’s rights.

This shows itself in others ways as more family’s rely on two incomes just to make ends meet, leaving a generation of children being raised in daycare and who have little contact with their parents in the most important part of the formative years.  Slowly and methodically the working climate has changed in a way that has lead the current generation to believe that both parents SHOULD be working. As a result the outrage that should be evident across the country is missing and the most vulnerable of our citizens are being forced into a modern indentured servitude because 75 hours a week in an entry level job does not leave much room for upward mobility and advancement.

 

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4 Comments

  1. Jon July 18, 2013
  2. Kimberley Hunt July 18, 2013
  3. Lydia July 23, 2013

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